AustLit

'In 1928 ethnographer and geologist Herbert Basedow undertook a privately funded expedition through western Arnhem Land. The photographs he took on that trip constitute some of the first photographic images of western Arnhem Land rock-art. In addition to his photographs, Basedow kept a field journal that reveals a relatively enlightened attitude towards Aboriginal art, considering the views commonly held by Europeans about Aboriginal peoples during this era. The rock-art sites Basedow recorded in 1928 remain sites of significance to the Kuninjku site custodians who have their own contemporary interpretations of the paintings photographed by Basedow some 75 years ago. Comparisons are presented between Basedow's 1928 documentation and the contemporary Kuninjku view of these sites.'  (Publication abstract)

'Physically the book is small, a convenient size for a pocket guide to the night sky. It contains many sky maps, some using the conventional Western astronomical names for constellations, others compiled and drawn by Cairns. They are not simple guides to the sky but rather function to mark out the pathway taken by the protagonists in the dramas described by Bill Yidumduma Harney and recorded by Hugh Cairns. There are many illustrations but the numbering is frustratingly obscure. Even more frustrating was the fact that, despite my carrying the book in a small plastic wallet, it completely disintegrated leaving me with a stack of loose sheets.'  (Introduction)

Martin Thomas’ cultural study of the Blue Mountains is developed using a familiar technique of juxtaposition and antithesis, derived ultimately from Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. It is focused on four main topics in the history and folklore of the area: European exploration narratives and paintings; Aboriginal myths which have accrued or been invented for the place; the fascinations of its topography and cliffs and the tourism paraphernalia that surround them; and a highly discursive account of the early life and, in 1957, the death of V Gordon Childe, in his generation the pre-eminent archaeologist of Europe and the Middle East. An overarching theme is that of the mountains as the labyrinth—‘the most pervasive colonial metaphor for the topography [of the Blue Mountains]’ —threatening loss and death. The settlements perched on the narrow ridgelines express ‘the unsettled quality of settler life’ (p.81). Along the way there are some useful polemics against the environmentalist gospel of the Maxvision film The edge; against the notion of wilderness; against the small and now dispersed museum of capricious and grotesque ethnology put together in a small-time private museum (by a man named Mel Ward); or against the destruction of the small, ‘wrong side of the tracks’, predominantly Aboriginal community of Catalina, for the sake of development of a race track. (Just to give a sense of the flavour of the writing, the last is titled ‘Homage to Catalina’, with its implied reference to Orwell, and to lost causes.)'  (Introduction)